Director takes a break from wizards to work on Cholera

Director Newell takes a break from wizards to work on Cholera

Published 6:30 am, Friday, November 16, 2007

In recent years, Latin America has produced some of the world's most acclaimed filmmakers. So who got the job of adapting a major novel by Latin America's most renowned writer?

How about Mike Newell, a self-described "middle-aged Englishman" best known for Four Weddings and a Funeral and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire?

Even he seems a little surprised he got the job.

"I thought they'd likely choose (Alfonso) Cuarón or (Walter) Salles or another of those really, really excellent South American directors," he says.

Newell lobbied for the job but, no, not in retaliation for Mexico's Cuarón and Brazil's Fernando Meirelles recently adapting books by the veddy British P.D. James and John le Carré. Rather, after making Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Newell says, "I wanted another kind of experience. I didn't want children and wizards and broomsticks and whatnot."

Without a doubt, Love in the Time of Cholera is a different kind of experience. The 1985 novel by Gabriel García Márquez is a meditation on the enduring power of love.

Tracy Letts: 'I had some great stuff land on my doorstep'Associated Press

10 Things You Didn't Know About Reverend Billy GrahamGoodHousekeeping

Kehlani Opens Up About the Best "No" She's Ever ReceivedCosmopolitan

Kirstie Alley Gets Slammed for Calling Curling 'Boring'Wibbitz

As adapted by Newell and his collaborators, the movie — which opens today — is sexy and funny and as steeped in the heat and passions and culture of García Márquez's native Colombia as possible, considering the filmmakers and cast come from all over.

Javier Bardem stars as the mousy, love-struck but sex-obsessed Florentino Ariza, a role as far as imaginable from the cold-hearted killer Bardem portrays in No Country for Old Men, which also opens today. Bardem is from Spain. Giovanna Mezzogiorno, the actress who portrays his lifelong inamorata, is Italian.

The film is in English, a language that Montenegro and many actors in small roles do not speak. Montenegro learned enough to get by during production, although Newell says she since has forgotten it.

To create the illusion the actors are from the same region of the unnamed Latin country in which the story is set, they all were trained to speak English with a particular Colombian accent native to the northern coast.

"There was never a consideration for the film not being in English," Newell says, "since the money is American, and the money has a right to recover itself in its own market."

García Márquez read the script before production began. His advice "was all to do with structure and clarity," Newell says. The Nobel Prize-winning author compared his writing to quilting, with numerous textures and detail and layers held together by stitch work.

In his notes, García Márquez asked, "Where is my stitchwork?" He was asking for a leaner, more straightforward story, Newell says.

"The book is so dense, so full of such wonderful detail," the director says. "The audience has to be able to find its way through the story."

The final script, by Ronald Harwood, who won an Oscar in 2003 for The Pianist, pares away several points of view and tells the story without so much jumping back and forth in time.

Newell spent seven or eight months in Colombia to make the film, which he shot in 10 weeks. He describes it as a difficult shoot.

Colombia has no film laboratories, so footage was flown to Miami daily and then to England to be processed and edited. Normally, filmmakers review their progress by viewing what are called dailies.